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New Richard Rich Interview

My friends from The Jewel Riders Archive recently brought my attention to an online interview in which The Swan Princess director Richard Rich answered several fan questions. His responses were quite lucrative. I learned many things I didn't know, including his brief stint at Disney in the '80s, the story behind the many recent sequels, and his response to voice actress Michelle Nicastro's death. While you could click the link and read the full transcript for yourself (which I also recommend), I also wanted to share my thoughts on some of the most interesting highlights.

As many of you may know, The Swan Princess was a famous 1994 animated feature film inspired by the "Swan Lake" ballet. It had two animated direct-to-video sequels in the late '90s and was all but forgotten until 2012, when a series of horrendous CGI direct-to-DVD sequels began popping up every year thereafter with no sign of stopping. It didn't come as too much of a surprise that Rick would support this low quality cash cow. Unlike other former Disney animation directors such as Don Bluth, Richard Rich does not have any big hits to his name besides The Swan Princess, so it makes sense that he would jump at the opportunity to milk it. The majority of his resume post Disney consists of low-budget biblical shorts for kids that most likely did not make much of a profit.

The first fan question Rick answers in the interview is about how he got into animation. His story about getting into Disney was surprisingly inspirational. I had no idea he had managed to sneak in through the back door by constantly writing letters and making phone calls to Disney. His persistence finally paid off when they offered him a low-paying job in the traffic department. From there, he got their attention by teaching piano lessons during his lunch breaks and got hired as an Assistant Director to one of the "Nine Old Men" because of his musical know-how. Unfortunately, the only two movies he worked on under the mouse were The Black Cauldron and The Fox and the Hound from the '80s, neither of which were very popular.

For 3 months I would write a letter to Disney and the next week I would call and...so on. Finally they said “ok ok enough, come in and we will give you a job in traffic”...An Assistant Director was retiring...they thought it would be nice to have someone who knew something about music...I got the job! Really just a typical Hollywood story of going from nowhere to somewhere.

He answers other questions about how he chose to make The Swan Princess because he wanted to make an animated movie based on a fairy tale that hadn't been done before and decided to have the climax take place on a night with no moon so that Odette wouldn't be able to turn back into a human. The movie apparently took about three years to make. A lot of that time was dedicated to storyboarding and designing characters and backgrounds. Sadly, Richard Rich claims that "traditional animation is pretty much a thing of the past," a topic that creates a lot of heated debate among animation fans. He blames the lack of demand for hand-drawn art and high-end traditional artists for The Swan Princess's transition from beautiful traditional animation to hideous CGI sequels.

What brought on these cringe-worthy sequels that continue ruining our childhood memories? According to Rick, it started out as a result of Sony Pictures noticing a decline in DVD sales around 2010 while Swan Princess DVD sales still "remained kind of steady." Just as sequels are usually born, Sony decided to shoot for quantity over quality and requested that the team behind the animated trilogy make more Swan Princess movies. Richard Rich claims that they made the characters "look pretty close to what they look like in 2D" using computer software but I think that's debatable. Odette's CGI look lacks all of the magic that her original counterpart had, and it doesn't help that these movies have paper-thin plots. It's great that Odette and Derek got to adopt a little girl, but making three movies entirely about her uninteresting life was totally unnecessary, even though Rick claims later in the interview that Alise was never meant to take Odette's place as the main character.

The interview concludes with an audio bite of Rick talking about the untimely death of Odette's voice actress, Michelle Nicastro. Apparently, she had passed away only three days before she was scheduled to come in and record the first of the CGI sequels. That came as quite a shock to me because I did not know she had been involved in them at all, nor did I know that the sequels were in production at the time of her tragic death. He makes a touching tribute to her, saying that she "was as sweet as the character Odette." For better or worse, Michelle's legacy as Odette continues to live on with two more CGI sequels currently in production. Richard Rich claims that he is "hoping there will be many more and it looks like everyone is working to make that happen."

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

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In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …